A Raleigh body parts supplier who was shut down last week used a Triangle consumer group to scout donors and carved corpses in a local funeral home's unsterilized embalming room.

Philip Guyett's actions spurred a leading tissue supplier in July to begin recalling hundreds of body parts intended for transplant. AlloSource of Centennial, Colo., recalled about 300 parts Guyett shipped to a company it recently acquired, Jennifer Tramontana, an AlloSource spokeswoman, said Tuesday night.

Officials with the Funeral Consumers Alliance of the Triangle said they introduced Guyett, owner of Donor Referral Services, to other tissue-trade professionals during the past two years. The organization, whose mission is to help with end-of-life planning, produced a seminar at a Cary retirement community last year. There, Guyett pitched the idea of tissue donation to attendees, said Herbert Reichlin, a spokesman for the group,

Guyett and others from the body-parts trade at the seminar answered questions about donations and signed up several candidates, said Reichlin and an alliance board member, Harriet Bartnick of Raleigh.

"We had no idea about any of this," Reichlin said.

On Friday, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration ordered Guyett to shut his Raleigh business, citing several violations.

Among them, Guyett misstated the age, cause of death and other risk factors of at least five donors whose tissues he harvested for transplantation, medical research and commercial use, the FDA said.

Larry Parker, president of Cremation Society of the Carolinas, a Raleigh funeral home that referred potential donors to Guyett for a fee, said Tuesday that he let Guyett use the funeral home's unsterilized room during the past year to harvest tissue from cadavers.

According to the FDA, tissue being harvested should be sterilized or at least disinfected. The FDA said this week that it had not received any reports of harm related to tissue from the company.

Parker said FDA officials notified him several weeks ago that they were investigating Guyett. He said he helped authorities gather and review death records that the FDA says show Guyett misstated important medical details.

Guyett, 38, came to the door of his North Raleigh home Tuesday morning but declined to comment. His business and home telephone numbers have been disconnected.

Probe of referrals

The FDA also is investigating funeral home owners who referred donors to Guyett, an agency spokeswoman said this week. FDA officials could not be reached Tuesday, but they have declined to give more details about the investigation.

Parker said Guyett paid him $1,000 apiece for most of the roughly 60 donors the funeral home found for him. Parker said he did not know whether he was under investigation.

The investigation is apparently not Guyett's first trouble in the body-parts trade.

The Associated Press reported that a Philip Guyett with the same date of birth pleaded no contest to felony embezzlement charges in California in the late 1990s for selling a corpse that did not belong to him.

Tissue-collection companies collect, process and resell bone, ligaments, skin and tendons, some of which can be transplanted into patients. Guyett, for example, sold mostly to tissue banks and researchers.

Industry oversight

Only the FDA oversees tissue harvesting, and only when body parts are being transplanted, the agency said. No federal authority oversees the tissue-trade industry as a whole, which has become notorious in recent years for theft and for questionable research on cadavers and body parts. Tainted tissue can infect its recipients with serious -- possibly fatal -- diseases.

Last year, Biomedical Tissue Services of New Jersey was accused of processing stolen bodies and shipping nearly 20,000 tainted body parts -- including some belonging to Alistair Cooke, former host of "Masterpiece Theater" on PBS.

In an April e-mail message that Guyett sent Bartnick, he said he was scaling back business in the wake of that scandal but would remain in the tissue trade.

"Due to the problems, ... the industry as a whole is going to change," he wrote. "I am however still offering my services to Duke regarding brain recoveries."

Efforts to reach Duke officials were unsuccessful Tuesday night.

The Funeral Consumers Alliance generally supports organ donation, but it has been pushing for tighter scrutiny of the human tissue trade since 2003.

Bartnick said she is no longer willing to donate her body to research, though she will donate certain organs strictly for transplant. "This case is going to change what I do personally," she said.